Obama and Rudd — Perfect Together

TORONTO—As Group of 20 world leaders gather Saturday, one will be sorely missed by President Barack Obama: recently ousted Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, a liberal polyglot who was one of the president’s more-favored foreign compatriots.

Plagued by poor polls in an election year, Mr. Rudd was booted by his own party Thursday chiefly over his handling of a plan to implement a hefty mining industry tax. He would have had a one-on-one meeting with Mr. Obama Saturday. Instead, Australia will be represented at the summit by Treasurer and newly installed Deputy Prime Minister Wayne Swan.

Unlike the two presidents before him, Mr. Obama has had a hard time finding a global leader who’s his soul-mate. He’s been criticized for being aloof, even awkward on the international scene. But in Mr. Rudd, a farmer’s son turned China scholar, Mr. Obama found mind-meld.

“I wouldn’t call it a friendship exactly,” says a diplomat who’s seen the pair together. “More like library partners.”

Theirs was a relationship forged in the crucible of global talking shops—the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Singapore and the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh last year.

The new American president found in Mr. Rudd, 52 years old, an only slightly older but more seasoned politician “who doesn’t play the experience thing as a matter of superiority,” says Douglas Paal, an Australia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who knows the Australian leader well.

At the Pittsburgh meeting the two leaders huddled together, deep in conversation. “They were talking about the role of government,” the diplomat said. “You couldn’t imagine the animation, their staffers had to practically drag them away from each other.”

Mr. Obama confused some people last year when he told politicians not to get “all wee-wee’d up” over his difficulties with Congress. Mr. Rudd puzzles Australians with terms like “fair shake of the sauce bottle, mate.”

Both men are baby-boomer liberal politicians who believe in the power of government to solve problems large and small. Where Mr. Rudd infuriated mining interests with his proposal to share their “super profits” through a 40% tax, Mr. Obama demanded that BP PLC forgo shareholder dividends and pay for damage from the Gulf of Mexico spill. Both men have tried and failed to tax industry for emissions of heat-trapping gases. They’ve both struggled with revamping their nations’ health-care systems.

Mr. Obama has tried to offer homeowners a rebate for insulating their homes. So has Mr. Rudd.

But alas, Mr. Obama couldn’t insulate his friend from fallout over what critics on the right said were his intrusive industrial tax policy, and on left, his abandonment of his greenhouse-gas emissions plan—criticisms not unfamiliar to Mr. Obama. Mr. Paal says Mr. Rudd would have benefited from an Obama visit this year: an embrace by his powerful buddy would have impressed Australians, who prize the U.S.-Australia “special relationship.”

But Mr. Obama has cancelled his planned trip Down Under twice, once to press his health-care overhaul through Congress, and once in order to stay engaged on the BP spill.

The White House offered Australia’s new Prime Minister Julia Gillard congratulations, closing a statement by noting that Mr. Rudd is a “great friend to America.”

Mr. Rudd—who’s given multiple news conferences in Mandarin—gave an awkward farewell speech Thursday. Repeatedly pausing to fight back tears, he said he was proud of his accomplishments, but “I’m less proud of the fact that I have now blubbered.”

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G-20 Dispatches offers news, analysis and commentary from the sidelines of the conferences Group of Twenty, where world leaders tackle key issues facing the global economy. Contributions come from reporters and editors at The Wall Street Journal, WSJ.com, Dow Jones Newswires and more. Find complete coverage of the G-20 at WSJ.com/G20.